Fun with PDFs or wow, they've improved Acorbat 8

I am used to getting files that I really can't used in the form they are in. This is the life of a freelancer. Often the source files can't be found, or the creative artist is out of town, or some reason that all the client can give me is a pdf. I have learned, over the years, to extract every last drop from every PDF that I have had to work with.

The good news, is that each edition of Acrobat has gotten better. One can now export to html (although the results could not be put up on a page, at least you can have the pieces. But, you can also just grab text, and reflow it (which you could do before, but it wasn't always smooth. And you can click on a graphic, and export it by copying, and pasting into Photoshop. You could always do that by opening in Illustrator, but with so many ways to get things out of PDFs, perhaps I don't need the source files anymore.

And, I have been not asking for them either. If I can, I don't want to use word, or have to wait for a version to be created in Photoshop, if I can get it from the PDF, instead of Word.

I love that a product that used to be just for showing what something looked like, can do so much more. Printers, in fact, ask for Acrobat files instead of the sources files, because they are so much easier to work with.

Wikipedia has a lot on Acrobat. a lot of which i had forgotten, such as that there were others out there trying to be what Acrobat become. After that, a whole industry grew out of ad-ons to Acrobat.

Me, I'm just glad they keep improving it.